Enhancing the emergency response through community engagement
Image credit: EU ECHO, Matin Karimi
In April 2025, with the support of H2H, we launched a new project to enhance humanitarian programming in eastern DRC by providing real-time, community-driven data on protection risks and needs.
Since the escalation of conflict in January 2025, humanitarian response actors have faced severe access challenges and a dynamic situation, making data on needs and population movements challenging to access. This has been compounded by the funding cuts. Our scoping conversations revealed an urgent need for real-time, community-informed data for more effective programming.
Building on these consultations, we co-designed research with our partners Hope and Peace, CFAD, and Victim’s Hope, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore community perceptions.
We are focusing on areas of return in Masisi (North Kivu), and Kalehe (South Kivu), where people are coming back to highly volatile environments with limited support and rising local tensions. A quantitative survey will provide robust data on people’s priorities, perceptions on social cohesion and safety, with mutual aid, views of the humanitarian response, and how climate challenges affect community life.
For the qualitative study, we will engage with two selected communities in-depth over a period of several months. Through a mix of observation, informal and semi-structured conversations with community leaders and members, we seek to understand their situation, with a focus on existing efforts to address social cohesion issues, and recommendations on how these can best be supported by aid actors.
We will publish regular short bulletins with timely insights to support humanitarian actors in adjusting their strategies and interventions in line with evolving needs and priorities.
